Assessment

* Fire-Alternative Views

* CARELESS AND INDISCRIMINATE FIRE USE

Strategies

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We note here a report in 1888 to the California Board of Forestry (H. S. Davidson): "A half century following the Gold Rush was a period of the careless and indiscriminate use of fire consuming each year thousands of acres of fine timber, endangering and often destroying the property of settlers, menacing the homes of all those who live in timbered regions, the forest fire, year after year continues its ruinous course, unrestrained by the law, and unheeded by the majority of the people. Anyone traveling through the Sierras cannot fail to notice the large number of charred and half burned stumps of large trees, often twenty feet high, whose tops have fallen when the trunks were half consumed, and were themselves wholly or partially consumed upon the ground. These fires often assume such proportions that the atmosphere at a distance of 50 miles from the scene of the conflagration will assume that hazy appearance caused by dense smoke." Burning by sheepmen became so common from the 1870s through 1900 that the newspapers often printed stories about smoky fall days. In 1889 C. M. Dabney of Fresno, in a plea for control of sheep grazing and sheepherder fires, claimed, "There seems to be a combination of sheepmen . . . who pay no taxes, have no homes, defy our laws, and who say they do not understand English, to burn these magnificent forests as they go along." P. Y. Lewis, who herded sheep in the upper Mokelumne River drainage in 1876 77 asserted: "We started setting fires and continued setting them until we reached the foothills. We burned everything that would burn." And John Muir noted, "The entire forest belt is thus swept and devastated from one extremity of the range to the other" by sheepherder-set fires. This period of fire damage led to the first state laws prohibiting the setting of fires, either willingly or negligently, and a similar federal policy.